Anyone else remember Corel Linux?
I remember it and was there, on the KDE side of it. Summarized half-remembered version.
Corel WordPerfect had been ported to linux late in the 90s and they got this notion that people only bought Windows to use MS Office. So if they made their own OS, people would buy it just to use WordPerfect. They had grand plans to take KDE and linux and package it as a consumer grade OS. The closest other competitor doing that at the time was Caldera, and they were seeing some success, so why not eh?
They hired two people to “fix” KDE. But the people they hired had no idea how open source worked – how to interact with a community that functioned more like a meritocracy than a managed hierarchy. They showed up on the mailing list and tried to make demands – work on this, fix these bugs, adhere to our standards for this other thing, etc. When KDE didn’t jump to their whimsy, they sort of got annoyed and just decided to maintain a patchset or something.
The distro flopped hard. And it started with their management. They could have instead hired a half dozen KDE developers that were already contributing, started feature or bug bounty programs (like Google Summer of Code, which was great but came later), and possibly have pulled something amazing together.
That stirs a memory. I think this was the first time I tried Linux. Corel Linux came on the CD accompanying the German gaming magazine Gamestar. When I tried it out I couldn’t see the mouse cursor. The mouse worked, the cursor was just invisible. Thus ended my first foray into Linux.
Found it on archive.org: https://archive.org/details/gs-42000-b
Yes, the problem is that the main reason people used Linux was because it was Free Software.
So a proprietary Linux didn’t bring the usual benefits of Linux, it was just one more proprietary OS. And unlike BeOS or NeXT it didn’t bring much to the table compared to Windows or other Linux distributions.
Yes, the problem is that the main reason people used Linux was because it was Free Software.
Well, to be fair that was what the nerds using it at the time wanted. They weren’t Corel’s target consumer though.
I remember Corel Linux. It offered one of the nicest Linux desktop experiences at the time. If you wanted WordPerfect, it was also a great deal.
Leveraging your word processing market share to establish an OS presence is the opposite of what Microsoft did.
What is amazing about Corel these days is the museum of once market leading software that they still somehow sell. In addition to WordPerfect, who is using Quattro Pro ( spreadsheet ) or Paradox ( database ) these days? Who ever used their Presentation software?
For that matter, who is using CorelDRAW? It was right up there with PhotoShop at one point but you never hear about it anymore.
Like Nortel and Blackberry, it seems like Canada is able to grow massively successful tech companies but it just cannot hold on to them.
Uh… In what way does BeOS have any similarities to Windows 9x? It resembles more like Next step if at all. The Author never took a look at it huh?
But no I’ve never heard of Corel Linux.
Yeah I guess that’s my fault here that I lived through the 90s starting with windows 3.1. I saw Teleshopping praising and selling the illegal BeOS variant Zeta. But I always found it’s dockable windows very cool. Something that no other OS ever did, not even today.
Looks like win 95 IMO :-D
- No Taskbar,
- Tasklist on the top right (also not in front),
- Dockable Windows,
- Package Manager,
- Bright Yellow half titlebars
How’s the atlantic anything like the pacific?
- smaller
- not in the same spot
- doesn’t get the same amount of sun
- different countries in it
- doesn’t help you go to the same places by boat
Truly nothing in common. Might as well be comparing an apple to caulking a window
You’re not wrong. KDE 1.x very much aimed at the Win95 market. They even directly targeted the windows userbase with jokes. The ordinal Win95 had a little fly-in animation that said “Where do you want to go today?” with an arrow pointing at the start menu. KDE 1.0 had this too, but it said “tomorrow” instead of “today”. Etc.
KDE also stole good ideas from wherever they were found. Trash is thus called because of Apple. The virtual desktops came from CDE. Etc. Sometimes it stole too much, and we would have discussions about flying too close to the sun, and tweak something so it would be just different enough not to raise the ire of lawyers.
Corel Linux was a KDE distro, so it largely had that familiar Win9x look, even if it felt different once you were actually using it. KDE later developed it’s own identity, but it retains its history and the baggage that comes with it.
